Putting a Price on Rainforests

With the right incentives, people will pay to preserve and renew tropical forests, one of the planet’s best means of storing carbon dioxide. But placing a value on the role trees play in mitigating climate change will require a robust credit market, and there is danger in postponing its creation.

NEW YORK – In early October, shortly after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that his company could, given the opportunity, rebuild the island’s electrical grid using solar power. Coming in the midst of so much human suffering, it was a bold claim. But from a technological perspective, the timing was perfect. By late October, solar panels and high-capacity batteries had been installed at San Juan’s Hospital del Niño, and additional projects are in the works.

This type of response to a natural disaster – replacing a fossil-fuel-reliant power grid with renewable energy – should be applauded. But no matter how clean and efficient renewable energy sources may be, they will never fully mitigate the climatic effects that are bringing more hurricanes like Maria ashore.

There is another way to do that, and it is far cheaper than what Musk has proposed.

Journalistic style: nice to read but without logical development:"On the island’s eastern tip, the nearly 29,000-acre El Yunque National Forest is one of the Caribbean’s most important systems for capturing and storing carbon." followed by "Maria destroyed the forest". So, does the forest, after being destroyed, have a greater carbon stock than before the hurricane and still increasing? surprising!It is not true that by REDD+ "the world gets more carbon sinks to soak up greenhouse gasses.". The principle is that REDD+ should reduce deforestation and degradation; "reduce" doesn't mean "eliminate"; it means that deforestation and degradation should go on at a reduced rate with respect to baseline projection; therefore even with a REDD+ success the world gets less carbon sinks. But that's theory. Ten years after its start and billions being poured into the effort REDD+ has not been able to reduce deforestation and forest degradation. Instead of showing evidence of the contrary the article gives the example of Brazil that confirms that deforestation is going on (at a smaller rate with respect to the last decade), absorbing more carbon than any other country simply because has a forest biomass greater than any other country, but emitting more carbon from deforestation and degradation than it is absorbed by its forests. The fact that deforestation in Brazil is again on the increase doesn't leave much optimism on the REDD+ initiatives.If it is logical that "Creating a market for REDD+ credits would create investment opportunities in tropical forest preservation for heavily polluting companies and industries" it is to observe that the exchange of credits generated by REDD+ (if they are produced somewhere they are anyway much exceeded by "debits" derived by deforestation and degradation elsewhere) with emissions from industries won't reduce emissions: 1) why, where, how, by whom? it is not explained; 2) once one has the chance to compensate emissions with those credits (s)he has no reason (either normative or moral) to reduce emissions. A simple sum shows that the mechanism doesn't achieve emission reduction but invites (given also the cheap price of those credits) polluters not to take initiatives to reduce their emissions.If, after 10 years of implementation and (our) money spent, "REDD+ is merely a set of guidelines, and a forest credit market will require rules and standards to govern how protection and reforestation allowances are allocated to buyers and integrated into current markets", not having produced any tangible result, I consider it a mechanism not capable to add any contribution to the fight against climate change and developed by a gang I don't trust at all.A more simple mechanism, as giving money to those who actually protect and conserve forests (instead of to those who produce unintelligible projects and programs without an implementable managing and rewarding system and result indicators) would assure transparency and results. Forests are there, easily measurable, thanks to present technology. It could be implemented and deliver results immediately.

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